Dopass.com

I had an interesting thought this evening while talking with some friends that I wanted to discuss. In a nutshell, as the title suggests:

Is the idea of "core" mechanics holding us game designers back?

I might be a little drunk, so bear with me...

I've been playing a lot of Dead Rising lately and I have to be honest, I'm not really sure why. Don't get me wrong, it's an obviously good game, but it's not really my type of game. I think the entire genre of survival horror is pretty worthless. I like horror, but the way it's translated into gameplay has been, to me, annoying at best. RE series? Hate it. Silent Hill? Hate it. But Dead Rising? LOVE IT.

So, why? What sets it apart? It's not the story. It's the gameplay, no question about it. So today I asked myself, "What is it about the gameplay that makes it better?"

The best answer I could come up with is that the game's "core mechanic" is diversity.

Let me clarify: You could argue that Dead Rising has two core mechanics around which the entire game is wound. These mechanics are Combat and Hostage Rescue.

However, because the majority of the combat uses in-world objects, combat is incredibly diverse. I've killed 200 hundred zombies in a 20 minute stint before and never once thought to myself, "This is getting boring." I've killed over a thousand zombies, total (remember I spare them as often as I kill them, so for me that's a high number). The combat hasn't gotten old. The same cannot be said of Resident Evil, can it?

I mean, at the end of the day you're either running from Zombies or killing them in both games, but RE's combat is flat, stale, most of the time. Yes, you could argue that the zombies themselves are more diverse in Dead Rising, and you can also point out that you have way more combat abilities in Dead Rising, both are true, but that's my point.

Dead Rising seems to be built around the idea of letting the player play the game the way he or she wants to. Hell, you don't even have to pay any attention to the story. Case in point:

I had restarted the game recently and this morning I was in the middle of the second case. Without giving anything important away I was fighting a boss. Just as the boss died, time ran out for the case. I hadn't been paying attention, and since the cinematics continued and I didn't get a case denied message at the time, I didn't realize this was the... case. So I ran back to the security office to talk to everyone there. They gave me their speeches and cinematics just as if I had succeeded, so I still hadn't realized I'd run out of time. But immediately after that, I got the case failed message and a screen asked me if I wanted to reload, restart, or continue. I agonized over the decision for a good half hour. Why, you ask?

Simple: I didn't want to go through the trouble of fighting the boss I'd just beaten, again. So I spent that half hour asking myself, how much did I really care about the case and the story it was telling? On the one hand, I did want to find out the how, why, when and where of the zombie outbreak, but on the other hand isn't my primary concern simply surviving the zombie infested mall and catching my chopper rendezvous so I can get the hell out of there?

The thing that made me think was that in Dead Rising, either restoring to try again or continuing on are both perfectly valid choices. In fact, you even earn different rewards if you pursue either choice (complete the story or just survive) - and both sets of rewards are worth having.

Do see where this rambling stream of drunken consciousness is going? You can argue that combat and hostage rescue are the two main mechanics of Dead Rising, but I suspect you might be wrong. Dead Rising might not have a core mechanic. Instead, I think it might have a pool of mechanics that together create a role-playing space. Simply put, the mall is a decision space and every mechanic in the game is equally valuable in allowing the player to explore that decision space as he or she sees fit.

I think this is why Dead Rising feels "next-gen" to most developers that play it. There's only one wrong way to play: Die. This is unlike RE, where you cannot progress unless you solve all the puzzles and kill all the boss characters/monsters (to be fair to RE that's true of 99% of the games out there). The Zombie story is a great way to constrain the decision space into a manageable set of mechanics, but ultimately this philosophy applies elsewhere. Say, in the GTA series, for example.

So now, you're probably snorting to yourself and thinking, "Great you like sandbox games. We had to wade through this rambling essay to get to that?" Maybe that's all I'm saying, but I think there's more to it. I mean Dead Rising is not exactly the same sort of sandbox game you get with GTA, but it's similar and I do think it's why both games are so appealing, however not all sandbox games are. For example, I can't be bothered with Saint's Row and it's been a LONG time since I found a game like SimCity entertaining.

In other words, some sandboxes are more interesting than others. Why? I think it's about the constraints with the sandbox.

SimCity has a pretty specific goal: Make the city thrive. Dead Rising has a similarly specific goal: Escape the Mall. However, even though both games are similar in this philosophy (present a single primary goal and a myriad of minor or player set goals) the minor goals within Dead Rising - even the ones the player sets for himself - are much more interesting. GTA, on the other hand, forces the player to make a choice periodically: Pursue the story to win, or wander off and enjoy sand box play. You can't win the game by playing in the sandbox; you have to pursue the story to win.

In other words: "Finish the linear narrative" is a core mechanic in GTA. You can't win if you don't do so.

So, to get back to the point: I think games have been narrowing their scope - constraining players to just the core mechanics and primary goals. Perhaps this has been done to manage budgets and keep the workload lighter or perhaps it's done because the majority of teams are not creative or talented enough to do otherwise. Either way, I think it's holding the industry as a whole, back.

I think that the games that allow the players to explore larger and more diverse decision spaces with a greater number of overall mechanics/tools - games such as Dead Rising - are going to continue to be break out hits because it's within these games that players are experiencing new gameplay - new ways to play games - and that's what players are hungry for.

Unfortunately, the majority of the industry is heading in the opposite direction. Even the MMO industry, which used to be all about this philosophy of "let the player play the way he wants to", is heading the other way. Games like WoW, EQ2, CoX and even my beloved AA all severely limit how players can explore the decision spaces of those games.

In EQ2, which I play regularly, I can't just log in and not fight or craft. There flat out isn't enough to do within the mechanics that are not "core" to keep a player's interest. This is true of almost every single game - especially modern MMOs - released since the turn of the century.*

In AA we did it because we were trying to create something akin to a casual game. We wanted you to be fairly focused in what you did so that you could easily manage your play time. But you know what? I think we made a mistake. I think that, had we instead tried to support more diversity in the gameplay, there would be more players. I read an interview with H (that's Hermann) on Ten Ton Hammer recently, and if I've interpreted what he's saying correctly, I think he agrees with me. It will be interesting to see what the future updates hold in store for Auto Assault. I doubt they have the time or the resources to take this philosophy to its pinnacle in AA, but even so, more diverse gameplay can only make the game better.

Sorry, I'm rambling again. I blame the pineapple tequila and rockstar I've been chugging all night (wholeheartedly recommended, btw). Let's try to wrap this up, shall we?

I think that games that single-mindedly focus on a small collection of mechanics ("core mechanics") lack any real innovation in this day and age. I think the direction the industry needs to focus on is diversity of experience within a single game. There should never be a single "right" way to accomplish a goal in a next-gen game. Instead, there should be at least three, if not 30.

Yes, it's more work and it requires a lot more forethought, but I think that's a good thing. I think preproduction (the phase of development where initial designs are created, sanity checked and approved for production) is the single most underutilized (read: screwed up) phase of development we have.

Maybe if we start new projects knowing we need a lot more diversity we'll spend more time planning our designs out ahead of time, and won't that make the games better anyway? Even if I'm wrong about diversity itself being what makes games like Dead Rising great?

- Snipehunter